To Get Easter and Passover Celebrations Right, Use an App

For many Jews and Christians, the next two weeks bring opportunities to share meals and practice traditions whose elements never escape memory.

But others will spend evenings scrambling to find recipes and guides to activities so they don’t disappoint guests who have exacting standards for meals or religious rituals.

If your children, like mine, tend to monopolize the family computers whenever you need them, mobile devices are a solid alternative, especially when loaded with the right software.

For traditional Easter activities, apps for egg dyeing and for conveying the religious meaning of the holiday to children mix solid advice with great graphics, while Passover apps on Apple and Android do the same for the Haggadah and the Four Questions.

The holidays are also a good time to check free cooking apps like Epicurious, BigOven and AllRecipes.com for Android and Apple and offer recipes for traditional foods in a format that’s useful for glance-and-mix cooks.

This week, for instance, Epicurious listed hundreds of holiday recipes, including Easter Lamb Soup, Italian Easter Bread, Passover Lemon Cheesecake and Passover Honey Nut Cake in Soaking Syrup. Epicurious recipes have been tested by chefs before being published in Condé Nast magazines like Gourmet, Self and Bon Appétit.

BigOven’s holiday recipes require more of a leap of faith for cooks because they are posted by users and, often, reviewed by only one or two readers. Easter and Passover recipes are also slightly tougher to find on BigOven because the search feature is less effective than the one on Epicurious. Queries for “Easter,” for example, returned many recipes with “Eastern” in the title.

Whole Foods Market Recipes, which is free on Apple, features no holiday-specific recipes. But last-minute chefs can type a list of ingredients on hand, like matzo, for instance, and retrieve a list of workable recipes. Chocolate-Covered Matzo Bark, a vegan recipe, was one result.

The app won’t be a perfect fit for all Passover chefs. If you search Whole Foods with the keyword “kosher,” some puzzling results appear, including pork ribs and two pork chop dishes. The same problem afflicts BigOven, where a pork shoulder recipe with kosher salt turned up. I found no such glitches on Epicurious or Allrecipes.com.

Easter eggs straddle the line between food and art, depending on one’s ambitions. And one’s ambitions are perhaps never more fully stoked than they are after a little tutorial from Martha Stewart.

Egg Dyeing 101 from Martha Stewart Living ($1, on Apple) is vintage Stewart. It features 101 eggs in 20 different categories.

Choose the pink bunny egg from the Egg Creatures section, for instance, and the app lets you download or print a template for the materials and follow a step-by-step manual for building the creature. (Hint No. 1: Glue on the feet first so the egg will stand. Hint No. 2: Don’t expect it to look like Martha’s.)

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For the dye-averse, a good alternative is iColor Easter Eggs ($2 for Apple), which helps you design and share, through e-mail, brightly colored eggs without risking Technicolor carpet stains.

Easter Egg, free on Android, offers similar functionality, but it has attracted uneven reviews from users.

Those for whom Easter celebrations are more closely tied to religious practice have fewer choices. Among them is the highly rated Easter Cross (Free) Live Wallpaper (for Android), which displays a crucifix against an array of customized backgrounds.

Photo

The Gourmet Live iPad app with several recipes for Passover.

Apple users face a similar dearth of apps about the religious aspects of the holiday. One highly rated choice is Not by Bread Alone: Daily Meditations for Lent 2011 ($1 for Apple), which includes biblical readings that users can share through e-mail.

Children’s Easter (free on Apple), from the publisher of the Children’s Bible, offers Christian parents a way to tackle one of the more challenging rites of spring — explaining the crucifixion of Jesus to younger children. The comic-book format is sometimes hindered by intrusive advertisements, but the child-friendly art and text are well done.

Passover gets much more respect from mobile software developers, at least when it comes to apps that provide religious information.

Haggadah ($3 for Apple)offers a brief and summarized version of the Haggadah, the text traditionally read at a Passover Seder. The app is highly rated by iTunes users, but it is also sparsely rated, so prospective buyers should read the description closely. Users can hedge with iHagadah ($1), which features a full version of the Haggadah.

On Android, the Union Haggadah ($1) presents “a Reform Haggadah published in the early 20th century in the United States,” along with guidance on conducting the ceremony and historical information about the holiday.

Mobile devices can also help children overcome anxiety associated with asking the Four Questions, which the youngest Seder participant sings to prompt the retelling of the Passover story. With iMahNishtana ($1 on Apple), users can memorize those questions through flash cards, recordings and other options.

On Android, Ma Nishtana ($1) features a computerized voice that reads the Hebrew version. It’s good in theory, but unless you already have some knowledge of the pronunciations, the voice is difficult to understand.

Any tech-savvy child would last about 15 seconds with the app before speeding off to YouTube, where far better tutorials await, free.

Quick Calls

Pictorial (free on Apple), a game involving spatial reasoning, has earned fantastic ratings from iTunes users. The gameplay is challenging, the graphics are compelling and an ad-free version is available for $1. ... VocaLive ($20 on Apple) offers studio-quality recording for singers and other professional vocalists. Its 12 vocal effects, like pitch correction and harmonizer, will also charm hobbyists. ... Tired of trying to remember the names of good apps owned by your friends? ShareMyApps, free on Android, lets you create a list of apps to share or send a link for specific apps.

Correction: April 19, 2011

A picture with the App Smart column on Thursday, about apps for Easter and Passover, was published in error. The image to the right depicted a screen from the Gourmet Live app for the iPad, not from the Epicurious app.

A version of this article appears in print on April 14, 2011, on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: To Get Easter and Passover Celebrations Right, Use an App. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe